“I travel a lot but I haven’t made it to Asia,” he says on the sidelines of the 11th Global Travel & Tourism Summit in Las Vegas last week.

Kaufer, I guess, is an extremely busy man. His empire, TripAdvisor Media Group, attracts more than 50 million unique visitors across 18 brands. TripAdvisor-branded sites alone have more than 40 million unique monthly visitors, 20 million members, and over 45 million reviews and opinions.

Kaufer explained later in an interview with PhoCusWright CEO Philip Wolf that the idea behind owning 18 travel media companies was ““so that we circulate the audience”.

“We have a cruise vertical so that if people want to read cruise reocmmendations, they have a site to go to.”

And while he says hotel reviews dominate now in the millions of reviews it carries, TripAdvisor is expanding into destinations, car rentals, vacation rentals and restaurants.

Of these though, the next big thing is restaurants, he says, using the “Near Me” button and allowing customers to read reviews about local restaurants and places.

Kaufer says he had no idea TripAdvisor would become as influential as it has when he founded it in 2000. It started with a trip he was planning on his own and he was looking for recommendations. But everything looked the same, especially the hotel photos.

He then worked on a B2B model that the industry would use and when that didn’t work, “we pivoted and stumbled across the B2C model”.

He says the future of travel recommendations, originally built on wisdom of the crowd, now lies in layering it with wisdom of friends, referring to TripAdvisor’s partnership with Facebook which allows you to see your friends’ reviews and their most popular destinations.

Currently though user generated content dominates over “friend” content and Kaufer thinks that will remain so unless it’s for major destinations such as London where the chances are higher that more people would have visited and reviewed hotels in the city.

He says TripAdvisor will continue to “pull what we have shared on Facebook and enrich the experience”.

He does not dismiss the possibility of Facebook becoming a competitor “but it’d be hard for Facebook to replicate the reviews we have done”.

Google still keeps him awake, he admits. “In the Internet space, if you are not thinking of Google, then you have a problem.”

More acquisitions are planned and TripAdvisor is continuing its expansion – it launched in a dozen countries in the past year, including in the Asia region where it is looking to build up its B2B Business Listings service.

Kaufer admits it’s not making as much progress as hoped in every country. “We have high ambitions, people want mostly the same information but the competitors are different.”

On mistakes made, he says, “We could have spent more time with local resources, cross the ts and dot the Is more and localize it more.”

It would appear that if Kaufer believes that, and if Asia Pacific is tipped to be the next growth opportunity, then a trip to the region is nigh.